Eleven

The older we get, the easier it is to forget how young children really are. Eleven is an odd age. A child is on the cusp of adolescence but still prone to carrying a certain innocence. I don’t really know what eleven looks like anymore. It has been too long. Too much has happened. I do know that at eleven, I was still naïve. I didn’t know many curse words. I went to church. I got good grades. I loved my family and my family loved me. I was quiet and bookish, didn’t have many friends. I had childish wants. I had big, big dreams. I wanted Almanzo Wilder to marry me even if I didn’t quite know why. I was completely incapable of handling adult situations. I was sheltered. I was a good girl.

And then I wasn’t.

In 2010, an eleven-year-old girl in Cleveland, Texas, was gang raped by more than twenty men, repeatedly, over the course of four months. It was a crime of ever-increasing magnitudes, each new detail about the rapes more horrifying than the last—the abandoned trailer where a lot of the rapes took place, the sheer number of assailants, the video evidence, the way the town reacted, the way journalists reported the story. Every time I think about the case, I get nauseous. I am nauseous now. Revulsion is a reasonable response.

Consent is complex and that complexity can be uncomfortable but legally, a minor cannot give consent, even if she gives consent. Morally, we know that if a man hears an eleven-year old girl say yes, what he should really hear is no. If more than twenty men hear an eleven-year old girl say yes, what they should really hear is no.

Eleven is desperately young but it’s also so close to adolescence, to the whole world changing, to new ways of understanding, new ways of wanting. No matter who an eleven-year old is, though, there is no version of that age where a child is capable of making an informed decision about sex, let alone a gang rape with multiple assailants over the course of four months, which is what happened in Cleveland, Texas.

We don’t know how to talk about children anymore. We get so wrapped up in these shallow narratives about children being preternaturally advanced, about little girls wearing make up and dressing provocatively and seducing the camera, about little girls maturing faster, developing sooner. We forget. They are children, babies really, if we would allow them to be.

In the trial of Jared Len Cruse, one of the accused rapists, his lawyer Steve Taylor said, “Like the spider and the fly. Wasn’t she saying, ‘Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly?’ I’m sure he thought he was quite clever. He made this statement while questioning Chad Langdon, the lead investigator on the case. Taylor thought this might be a feasible defensive tactic. He thought he could plausibly assert that an eleven-year old child had the wiles to seduce all those men and that her complicity would somehow negate any guilt on the part of said men.

Langdon replied, “I wouldn’t call her a spider. I’d say she was just an 11-year-old girl.”

Taylor, having not quite reached the bottom of his ethical barrel, told Langdon he hopes such an accusation never befalls his teenage sons as if that might somehow make any part of the situation acceptable. Fortunately, Taylor’s strategy was unsuccessful. Cruse was found guilty. He will be in prison for a very long time. Most of the assailants in the case will be in prison for a very long time. They call this justice. And still, there will be more rape cases and more defense attorneys blaming victims of all ages and believing that’s a viable strategy because, historically, it has been.

We don’t know how to talk about children anymore. Even when the Cleveland, Texas case first gained national attention, we were at a loss for finding the appropriate language. There was no vernacular to accommodate everything terrible and wrong about the crime. We were careless. The New York Times, in one of their first articles, was concerned about the town and how the town was affected. The town’s citizens wondered where the girl’s parents were, and worried, of course, for those boys. Everyone everywhere wondered how such a horrific crime could happen. And still, we were talking about a girl who was eleven.

Over at Jezebel, Katie J.M. Baker posted about Steve Taylor’s remarks and a commenter discussed an eleven-year old girl to whom she is loosely acquainted. Of the girl, the commenter said:

She continues to dress like someone twice her age at family events, like Thanksgiving, where she was dressed as what I can only describe as a “sexy secretary” with a tight, shiny satin red shirt and a very tight pencil skirt with heels.

and

What can you do, really? I’m not her Mother. I’m not even her sister. But I feel like she could find herself in a bad situation if this continues. On the other hand, it feels distinctly un-feminist to tell a girl how she should dress or act because it suggests that any blame would lie with her.

We have no idea how to talk about children anymore. While I don’t believe there was any malice intended by the commenter, while I do believe she is, as she noted in her comment, conflicted, her words are still full of misplaced concern, victim blaming and this pervasive cultural belief that women and girls dressing provocatively leads to women and girls “finding themselves” in “bad situations,” instead of what actually happens— bad situations finding women and girls no matter where they are, how old they are, what they are wearing, or how they are comporting themselves.

This is of course compounded, in this instance, by the fact that we’re not actually talking about women. We are talking about girl children. Eleven-years old. No matter what they say or how they act or how they dress, eleven-year olds are children and we have twisted ourselves up so much that we have no idea what that means or, worse yet, perhaps we don’t care what that means.

It’s strange, this eagerness we have for placing the culpability for sexual violence everywhere but where it actually resides. I’m done with conversations about rape that do not place the responsibility for rape with rapists. I am absolutely done with questions about what the victim did or did not do to make themselves so vulnerable instead of what the predator did as he (or she) preyed. I am done with conversations about what potential victims can do to prevent rape instead of what rapists can do to stop raping. I am done with conversations about children and sexual violence that try to rationalize issues of consent and sexuality.

I’m not sure if misogyny is so culturally embedded that we cannot bear for rapists to bear the responsibility of their actions or if we’re terrified of our own vulnerability, no matter what we do to protect ourselves. Maybe we don’t know how to talk about children or even think about children because we don’t want to remember how little we once knew or face how much we would someday know.

Roxane Gay’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, West Branch, Virginia Quarterly Review, NOON, the New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Time, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The Rumpus, Salon, and many others. She is the co-editor of PANK. She is also the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, Bad Feminist, and Hunger, forthcoming from Harper in 2016. Roxane is Essays Editor Emeritus for The Rumpus. You can find her online at roxanegay.com.
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25 Responses to “Eleven”

As the mother of two grown daughters, the victim of three “date rapes” back in the 80s, and now mother to a 9 y/o boy, I have spent some time thinking about the topics of consent and rape and responsibility and how in the world to discuss such things with my boy. I’m still not sure how to begin, or when to begin, but this brilliantly written post certainly helps to form the beginnings of teaching respect and empathy for others, and responsibility for his own actions, which hopefully and seemingly is something we’ve been teaching him all along. Perhaps the key will be in teaching him to champion for others, even in the face of holding an unpopular position among peers.

If an 11-year-old boy dresses up in a suit, people are impressed with him for being grown up, serious, and responsible. If an 11-year-old girl dresses like an adult woman, everybody accuses her of being a hooker.

I’m glad to hear that the men who raped that 11 year old girl in Texas are going to jail. That’s what they deserve (and much worse). There is nothing a woman (or man, boy, girl) can do to deserve to be sexually assaulted or raped.

“Bottom line – as an adult, you are responsible for how you behave. Period. If that is in any other way than with respect and courtesy toward someone who does you no harm – no matter what they’re wearing – it’s you that needs the lesson in how to behave in the “larger global village,” not an 11-year-old girl in a pencil skirt.”

@MJC: And when a bunch of old white guys backed up what George Zimmerman was saying about Trayvon Martin’s hoodie? Should Trayvon have been told about the messages he was sending by wearing a hoodie? Or did that conversation need to be about how George Zimmerman needed to think beyond the messages he thought he saw vs. what was actually there before he committed a crime?
Is that boy dead because of the message he sent, or because of the message Zimmerman read?
And what kind of message do you think it sends to Zimmerman and people like him to hear powerful white people spouting that hoodie nonsense? That sense that everyone’s on your side and agrees with you sure makes it easier to believe you aren’t wrong.
Bottom line – as an adult, you are responsible for how you behave. Period. If that is in any other way than with respect and courtesy toward someone who does you no harm – no matter what they’re wearing – it’s you that needs the lesson in how to behave in the “larger global village,” not an 11-year-old girl in a pencil skirt.

@maribelle1963 “In your analogy, the man this girl would be receiving unwanted attention from, is equated with the cop on the beat, who would be just doing his job to arrest someone walking down the street smoking pot.”

You attached to a specific image in my analogy, one that was an optional possibility. I was more so providing an analogy of a specific type of person being harassed due to the way they dress. I was also providing the usual behaviors associated with the way one dressed, as perceived by those who want to assoctiate stereotypes to modes of dress.

As an African-American male in America, I greatly understand how I can be in a suit and still get harassed. Or be wearing baggy jeans and get harassed. And I understand you can switch those two situations, in a way, and I would not be harassed if wearing a suit, but I would be if wearing somewhat baggy jeans.

And I understand if a woman dresses a particular way, and then acts a particular way associated with the way she is dressed, she will usually get treated by the same and opposite gender in a certain list of ways. Whether or not any of this is socially acceptable, whether or not people are right to make these assumptions, is a different discussion.

@EROSE – “Frankly, reactions like the “she should know what message she sends” stuff are the only reason that girl’s clothes might be an issue for even a second. Because a predator hears from respectable society what he hears inside his own head to justify what he does.”

People need to know what messages they send in terms of body language and yes, the clothes they wear. No matter if they are male or female. It just makes sense in the larger picture of living in the global village.

And: “ecause a predator hears from respectable society what he hears inside his own head to justify what he does.”

A predator will justify whatever is in their head, no matter what ANYONE says. You can say the opposite, and if they want, they will twist whatever it is they are twisting. Let’s make this NOT about the people who attack others, what is in their heads, and more about the individual.

I remember very clearly that when you’re 11, beauty and adulthood seem to have all the answers. No one listens to you or believes your feelings or opinions are valid because you’re just a kid – it’s the automatic parental response right? “Because I know better than you.” Maybe so, but when you’re 11, it’s more important than you can imagine to have someone actually see you and hear you out, and the only people you see getting to do exciting things and be seen are adult women the movies or in magazines. You want to get there so badly, and your clothes are what you can control.
I can tell you right now that if anyone takes an 11-year-old girl aside and lectures her about her clothes, that person will sound like just another adult who refuses to take her seriously. Try doing something actually hard. Don’t concern troll at her. Don’t lecture her, don’t tell her anything. Ask her about her clothes. Ask her where she got them. Ask her how they make her feel. Then listen!
It’s not the way she dresses that will make her vulnerable – it’s the reasons she’s dressing that way. An adult who seems to understand and think you’re beautiful will be the world to you at that age, and predators know that where I think oftentimes parents refuse to know.
Frankly, reactions like the “she should know what message she sends” stuff are the only reason that girl’s clothes might be an issue for even a second. Because a predator hears from respectable society what he hears inside his own head to justify what he does. Every time that becomes a consideration, some asshole hears that he had a point. And so he’ll choose the confused girl in a pencil skirt to treat like a glamorous beauty queen, because he knows she’ll eat it up and be told she was asking for it.

It should be clear that women get raped no matter what they are wearing the same way people get attacked no matter what part of town they may be in. Violence knows no such stereotypes. Violence just happens.

But the woman’s original comment regarding what the girl may have been wearing is a valid subject when regarding young children and the way their perceive, and respond to, the society around them. And having the discussion of what one wears, or how one acts, has an affect on how they are perceived in public. Any notions of a woman getting raped “because she was wearing what she was wearing” is projected onto this discussion, as it is an outgrowth of the original discussion.

It is possible to split these two related lines of thinking into a discussion of how we do know how to talk to young people, but we need to be having these real discussions and not misognystically (both ways, men and women people) biased talks.

P.C. Fergusson: “We all need to be careful. The 11-year-old girl the commenter describes may be fine at a family Thanksgiving, but I hope she puts a coat on when she goes out on the street.”

The thing is there, you’re assuming that if she goes out wearing a coat rather than ‘sexy’ clothing, she’s less likely to be raped. That’s a common assumption, but I’m not sure it’s actually true. I’m inclined to think the kind of person who would sexually assault a young girl would be likely to do so anyway whatever she was wearing. But I’m not a rapist myself, so I wouldn’t know. I do know that it’s entirely possible for a woman to dress ‘modestly’ and still get raped.

I entirely understand the reasons for giving such advice: you want your friends and family to be safe, and if there’s anything they can do to be safer, you want them to do that. And you want to be safe yourself, and to think that you have some measure of control over your safety, so you can say ‘well, I did everything I could’. But if such advice isn’t actually of any use, then it’s not helpful.

Such advice encourages an environment of victim blaming, where rape victims were dressed ‘sexily’, on the assumption they somehow ‘brought it on themselves’ or ‘could have prevented it’; and perhaps victim disbelief, where they weren’t (‘how could she have been raped, she was wearing a coat?’). And worse, it may cause women to mistakenly think themselves safe when they actually aren’t.

Look, I’m a man and not at great risk of being raped myself, so to an extent my comments aren’t that relevant here; since women are the ones mainly at risk, they have the right to do or say whatever they think they have to do to reduce that risk. But personally, I’m with the original poster here: I think talking about what a woman or girl is wearing, in the context of rape, is missing the point entirely.

You raise a valid point, but inquiring about the victim can also lead to people blaming them; people think to themselves, “if she hadn’t been out at that time (or alone), if she hadn’t put herself in a situation where something bad could happen, etc.” We try so hard to distance ourselves from the reality of rape.

But you’re right–the sad, frustrating, terrifying reality is that we live in a rape culture, The solution is two-fold–we need accurate responses when something like this happens (i.e. the proper legal handling and media that doesn’t blame the victim), but we also need to work within our own culture–teaching women “not to get raped” is not the same as teaching EVERYONE that forcing yourself on another person (from sexual harassment to rape) is just plain unacceptable.

You just equated lighting up a blunt in public, an illegal act, with a young girl wearing a red top and high heels.

In your analogy, the man this girl would be receiving unwanted attention from, is equated with the cop on the beat, who would be just doing his job to arrest someone walking down the street smoking pot.

While misogyny is undeniably culturally embedded, I think a lot of the “what did she look like, what was she wearing, what did she drink” stuff, especially coming from other women, is just fear. The gut instinct to find a reason this couldn’t happen to me or this couldn’t happen to my child. The truth that it could happen to any of us at any time is too much terror to sit with, so we flail for small differences.

I’m in agreement with MJC. I don’t blame the victim, but I know myself that if I wear something sexy I get more male attention. If I don’t, I am safer — less visible. If our world were a better place, we could all dress as we please without fear of rude or even violent responses. But it’s not. We all need to be careful. The 11-year-old girl the commenter describes may be fine at a family Thanksgiving, but I hope she puts a coat on when she goes out on the street.

We need an article like this, but at the same time reading it made me so sad and angry.

We need to simplify our language and get back to basic truths–if a person says they were raped, BELIEVE them and HELP THEM. Don’t wonder in your mind what time it happened (after so many years reading about rapes on my old college campus, I think I’ve finally conditioned myself not to do that anymore), or what the person was wearing.

Call a rape what it is…a rape. When we sit around and debate whether or not it even happened (not in this case, but it’s certainly happened in others) you take away from the crime and the perpetrator and turn to the victim=–not to offer help, but to criticize and blame.

I don’t care how this girl dressed, how she acted. A bunch of predators raped her, repeatedly apparently(!)…the question isn’t what did she do to make them want her, the question is twofold: how do we help her, and how can we eradicate violence against [women and] children?

“We have no idea how to talk about children anymore. While I don’t believe there was any malice intended by the commenter, while I do believe she is, as she noted in her comment, conflicted, her words are still full of misplaced concern, victim blaming and this pervasive cultural belief that women and girls dressing provocatively leads to women and girls “finding themselves” in “bad situations,” instead of what actually happens— bad situations finding women and girls no matter where they are, how old they are, what they are wearing, or how they are comporting themselves.”

I don’t think she was victim blaming. She was making a very astute observation. At that age, they need to understand the perceptions applied to their bodies and selves. They need to understand the social connection between perceptions, expectations, and how all of that operates within a social structure. They need to know, at that age, that if you dress a particular way, there are going to be assumptions, and maybe actions associated with those assumptions. This will allow these kids to prepare, to, maybe, not be caught so off guard. To think more. Yes, physical appearance does not always begat the behaviors normally associated with those physically related assumptions. But physical appearance does portray a particular message. This message doesn’t give credence to ones actions, but it is a message nonetheless, and there is a widely accepted social notion of what that particular message entails.

This is when you’re a kid. Example…

If I see a kid (or maybe, a group of kids) dressed in baggy ass jeans, walk with a slight dip in his step, maybe a doo rag, grabbing his nuts as he walks, maybe with a blunt behind his ear, or maybe sparking a blunt, and I see a cop or a security guard nearing, or I just saw one, damn right I am going to tell them, straight up: You need to chill out with that. This is what people are thinking. Doesn’t make it right, what they’re thinking. Doesn’t make it right that they’re going to treat you like A B and C. It doesn’t mean what they think is correct, but you gotta understand how you present yourself carries consequences.

If I see some grown men doing the same, I let them know I saw a cop or security guard and I keep walking.

I want to write more, to further clarify my point, but I am at work and it time to clock out. Maybe I’ll reiterate a little later…

It is so much simpler to point to the place or thing that evokes a feeling or response and say “the world is contained within that thing” than it is to realize that every thing that we do and feel and think is within us, and that only by touching us in the places where our defenses are weakest do those things impinge so heavily upon our realities.

Sexuality lives inside of us and we are responsible for all of the things we do with it, but that is a frightening notion. To have to admit that the urges which are most tantalizing and difficult to control are an indelible part of you – to admit weakness before temptation – is a fundamentally terrifying thing to do. And so we, as a sick world, a broken society with no parent or guide to chastise us into self-knowledge or protect us through our discovery, cast about outside of ourselves for the thing that has such power to change us into ravening monsters.

So I guess my answer is that we’re terrified of our vulnerability in the face of the admissions about ourselves that any honest condemnation of the most corrupted of the lot would entail. It is far easier to see a group of depraved men destroying the innocence of youth as somehow different than what we do when we fantasize about the sexual ownership of passing women than it is to admit that we are all of us (men) sick with the same disease that has eaten away the humanity and civilization of those with the least protection from it.

I never told anyone what happened to me until I was in my late twenties. I was between four and twelve while it all happened. There are photos somewhere in the world, videos. I am probably on a computer at the FBI and the computers of who knows how many pedophiles. I wonder what I am named. What my filenames are.

Thank you for writing about this girl. No one will write about me, because I have no proof. I am a ghost in the machine, now. Thank you for writing about someone who has proof. Thank you for writing about something no one can deny happened. Thank you for making sure this story is talked about. A fact. These Things Happen.

For the ghosts, it makes us feel like we aren’t liars. It Happens. It Happened. Look.

I think misogyny clearly is, as you suggest, imbedded in our culture, the impulse too often to blame the victim. (I am sure you’ve seen this story: http://jezebel.com/5941373/its-your-fault-if-youre-sexually-assaulted-by-a-drunk-cop-and-other-lessons-from-arizona This happened in a bar in Flagstaff where I lived when I was in graduate school. I have been in this bar. I have probably worn a short skirt in this bar. I could, so easily, have been this woman.) But while this sort of shaming is commonplace, I also think that the inclination to place blame on the victim is also because it is simply too terrifying to ponder that violence of this sort could be committed without provocation.

As the mother of an eleven year old daughter, this piece hit a particularly tender spot. Every single day I feel as though she is one step closer to that edge where childhood ends. But she is still very much a little girl…as are her peers, regardless of the clothes they wear, the poses they strike, the way they play and practice at being grown-ups. No matter how “provocative” they may seem.

I’m tired of it too, Roxane. I am done with it. So many of us are done with it. I hope that by being done with it, we can someday make it done. You’re voice adds that much more to the conversation, helping it grow. Thank you.

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